Princess Tinkerbell, wearing armor with a touch of AI-assisted art editing.
What? Will Eisner’s The Spirit is planning to trap belfry bats. What did you think he meant?
Lovely Internet Weirdness
One of the difficulties of being a humorist and trying to connect to people by being funny is that you have to compete for attention. Cartoonists have an advantage in that they can put something together with pictures and just a few words that you can get easily and quickly and then you laugh. So the internet is a nightmare maze of short-quick funnies with exceptional levels of weirdness. I keep track of the weirdness by keeping a weirdo file on my computer and copying things in it that make me go “Whaaaa?” and then laugh. Let me share a little of that with you.
The miracle that is Don Bluth.
So, therein lies the challenge I face daily. How do you compete with Muppet cupcakes?
Filed under art criticism, artwork, blog posting, collage, goofiness, humor
Spotted Trains
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains
The BFG (a review by the Uncritical Critic)
I was predisposed to like this movie from the outset. After all… Spielbergh… Roald Dahl… a musical score by John Williams… almost Robin Williams as the BFG! But I don’t like this movie after all. I LOVE it!!!
I am easily stunned by gorgeous settings, CGI magic, and artistically done visuals. I am easily captivated by cute and gifted young actresses like the one who plays Sophie, Ruby Barnhill. And I am especially won over by the smiling face of the BFG himself. He reminds me so clearly of my Great Grandpa Raymond (who was no less a magical being in my life than the BFG is in Sophie’s).
The fact that the BFG’s job in Giant Land is the capturing, bottling, mixing, and gifting of dreams is the most winning feature of all. And he uses it in the epic plan to overcome the bestial, cannibalistic, (and possibly Trump supporters) other, bigger giants. He is a metaphor for the story-teller himself… enduring hardships and harrowing adventures to capture, package, and deliver the stories that are so important to life and people’s ultimate happiness. It is true for Roald Dahl, the darkly silly genius who wrote the story. It is also true for Steven Spielberg, the craft-master and movie-maker who put it on film. It is true also for the magician of movie music, John Williams. I hope, someday, it will also be true for me.
So many things about this movie are the epitome of the best movie-theater experiences. I do not understand how it could’ve done so poorly in the box office. I believe it will become one of those beloved and much-watched DVDs like Spielberg’s previous fairy-tale masterpiece, Hook, did. I pray that it won’t simply become an overlooked asterisk in the history of cinema. It is too good of a movie experience for that.
Filed under artists I admire, goofy thoughts, humor, movie review
Islands of Identity
Who am I?
Why do I do the things that I do?
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
What Do Martians Look Like?
As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;
I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.
Malevolent Martians;
Martians Who Make the Mistake of Liking Us;
Inexplicably Goofy Martians;
Cartoon alien rendered on white background. 3D model licensed from DAZ3D.
Probably the only REAL Martians… from the future;
Filed under aliens, cartoons, collage, comic book heroes, foolishness, humor, illustrations, science fiction
The Final Fourth?
Well, the end of everything draws nearer. President Pumpkinhead has passed the Big BugUgly Bill, which takes away some of Medicare and Obamacare to give billionaires and some lowly millionaires an even bigger bug-ugly tax break. People are going to die. He has also dismantled the clean energy programs that were supposed to help save the world, so good luck with learning to breathe CO2 in 900-degree heat (as is the condition on Venus.) Some experts are predicting the fall of the American Empire in 3 years or less. Soon, you will meet some of the Mad Max apocalypse characters in real life. I hope Trumpalump meets one who is a cannibal who likes his meat poorly bronzed.
I have been feeling like I was going to die soon anyway. But it is nice to know it is coming soon to end my suffering. It is not a comfort, though, that most of the rest of you will be dying with me. Bummer, that.
Anyway, enjoy the fireworks. And I mean on the 4th, not World War Three. It is possible I will enjoy being a ghost. I already have a list of who I want to haunt.
I
Filed under Uncategorized
My Heart is Broke
This is a repost. She has been gone for a year now.
Dogs can’t live forever. Not even as long as a people can. And believe me, she believed with all her might that she was a people. She ate enough people food, mostly stolen, that she convinced herself she was turning into a human girl. But one people year is seven years of dog-year aging. And she was 98 by that measure. And she had doggy breast cancer, complete with a big nasty tumor.
Yesterday, in the veterinarian’s office, she laid down and went to sleep, leaving me and my daughter and my two sons and my wife behind. My fur baby passed away as I stroked her precious head for the last time ever.
She will be writing no more blog posts for me when I am not feeling well. She will no longer be thinking about running over neighborhood cats as she is driving the car. The local rats will fear her no more. And I will never be able to prove to anyone now that she was a talking dog.
We picked her up off the street as a lost puppy fourteen years ago. She apparently escaped from the local pet store and was written off on an insurance claim before the vet could even suggest that that is where she came from. A free Cardigan corgi puppy. She was a priceless part of our lives. She loved us as only a dog can, with ferocity, throwing tantrums and tearing up the trash can when we left her alone in the house.
I shall miss her until the day I die. Sleep well, Jade. You have earned your rest.
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 